Analysing a live event as it happens between bodies, space and audience, not just its script or score.
- +Fits Phenomenological Epistemology, Interpretivist Epistemology
- –Tension with Positivist Epistemology
Key thinkers: Richard Schechner, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Diana Taylor
The longer story
Performance analysis examines what happens in live events—theatre, concerts, rituals, everyday performances. Schechner's performance studies, Fischer-Lichte's aesthetics of the performative, Taylor's distinction of archive and repertoire. The challenge is analysing what disappears. Video captures something but not presence. You're studying an event whose essential quality is happening and ending. How do you make the ephemeral analysable without losing what made it matter?